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It is very important for all players to look at poker as a life long session. All the plays you make, beats you take and money won simply does not mean much of anything in a short span of time. What will matter is how these stats look after a player has played thousands and thousands of hands or games.
One important stat that is essential to understand and calculate is poker ROI. ROI stands for 'return on investment' which really translates to how much money are you making in comparison to what you are spending to play.
For example, if a player were to buy into a $6.50 9-man sit n go, this player would stand to win $29.25 for first, $17.55 for second and $11.70 for third respectively. If this player were to win first place, the ROI would be calculated into a percentage based on his or her winnings minus the difference of his or her initial buy-in.
This may seem confusing at first, but is much easier to understand once you know how to calculate ROI.
Win rate (stack sizes and rake influence win rate as well) (the better you are the less swing you have) session length (the longer the less swing) playing style (tigher = less swing) A tight player that dominates and play long sessions will almost never loose. The very best NL25 players in the world can expect to have a poker session winning percentage of around 60%. NL50+ Good Winning Percentage At NL50 and higher the drop in winning percentage becomes less and less.
How to Calculate Your ROI
Calculating poker ROI is very simple to do using the following formula:
* ($ Won - Buy In) / Buy In x 100 = ROI %
So using our example of a $6.50 9-man sit n go, let us assume that our player won first place. What would this player's ROI be? Well, let's plug in the numbers.
* ($29.25 - $6.50) / $6.50 x 100 = 350%
Wow! This is an incredible ROI as it shows that this player has earned 3.5 times his initial investment.
However, this is actually very deceiving. The reason that it is deceiving is because as we mentioned above, poker is a life long session and should not be based on one game. In other words, would you rather have an excellent ROI after one game and be a life long loser or lose one game and be a winning player over the course of your poker career?
I would lose one game and prefer to be a life long winner.
It is important that since poker is a life long session that it is understood that there are variances that will undoubtedly take place. That's why a ROI of 350% is unreasonable as it only shows one game and not a life long session of ups and downs.
For example, let's assume that our player played 1,000 games at the same stakes and won 1st place 77 times, 2nd place 186 times and third place 103 times. What is this player's ROI now?
First, we need to know how much this player won total. To do that, we will do the following:
* 1st Place - 77 x $29.25 = $2252.25
* 2nd Place - 186 x $17.55 = $3264.30
* 3rd Place - 103 x $11.70 = $1205.10
* Total Won = $6721.65
Now, you need to know how much your investment was:
* 1,000 games x $6.50/game = $6,500
To figure out our ROI all we need to do now is plug in our numbers into our handy formula:
* ($6721.65 - $6,500) / $6,500 x 100 = 3.41%
As you can see, that is quite a significant difference from a 350% ROI. This player here has played a standard sample size which should have had several variances, up and down, and has proved to be slightly profitable over time.
So, what is a solid ROI? Well, opinions will vary but the most common answer found will be around 10% or so. It is possible to be much higher, but if a player is looking at an ROI of 20%, 30%, or more, than it may be in their best interest to move up in stakes even if it means dropping the ROI a little bit. This is simply because even though the ROI will drop due to competition and such, there will be so much more money to be made playing at higher stakes. As long as a player is around 5 to 10%, they should be just fine.
Since we have tournament and sit n go ROI out of the way, it is time to now focus on all of you cash game players. Sadly, no, the ROI formula will not work for you.
Cash Game ROI
The ROI formula described above will not work for cash games because there are just too many different variables with no consistencies. Cash game players can sit down, buy in for the minimum up to the maximum, play for 5 minutes, then get up, and leave whenever they want. There is no set buy-in and worse yet it is much more difficult to use the ROI formula because there is no set prize pool either.
If a player wants to figure out how well they are doing at cash games, they will want to figure out how much money they are making per hour, similar to a job.
For example, if a player were to go online and buy in for $100 at a $1/$2 game and at the end of 1 hour they had $225 in front of them, they would subtract their buy-in from their total to see how much they profited.
* Total - Buy In = Profit
* Profit/Amount of Hours = $ Won / Hour
So, in our case, this is how much this player made per hour:
* $225 - $100 = $125
* $125/1 = $125 per hour
If he had the same amount after 8 hours, it would look like this:
* $225 - $100 = $125
* $125/8 = $15.63 per hour
This method of calculating an hourly rate can actually be used to figure out your hourly average over the course of a week, month or even a year as long as you keep track of how much you buy-in for each session, what you walk away with and how many hours you played each session. From here, you can determine how profitable you are at cash games.
Calculating Poker ROI
Hopefully it is apparent by now that calculating poker ROI is actually very easy to do. Not to mention that it is extremely important to learn simply because everyone has improvements to make in their game, whether good or bad, and knowing your ROI will let you know the extent of those improvements. Making improvements and adjustments is what poker is all about and solid poker players know this.
One of the concerns that I frequently hear, especially among small stakes poker players, is when and how to move up to a bigger game. How do you know if you are ready to move up to a bigger poker game or not? The simply answer is to move up when your bankroll is big enough, and move down when your bankroll is too small. But there are more things to consider besides just the size of your bankroll.
Are You Winning?
There's really only one way to know. You must keep track, down to the dollar (pound, euro, yen, peso, or yuan will do too), of how much you win and how much you lose in each poker session. If you're playing online then be sure to use poker tracking software – because statistics will not only let you know where your strengths and weakness are in your game, they will assist in your decision of what games to play and when to move up to the next level. By reviewing your playing history you'll be able to see how you are doing per hour and per big blind or buy-in size.
Win Rates and Return-on-Investment
In cash games your win rate is generally the number of big bets per hour for limit poker and big blinds per 100 hands for no-limit hold'em. Let's suppose you've played 20,000 hands of $25NL ($0.10 / $0.25 blinds) and have made a profit of $2,000. Your win rate would be 6.66 bb/100 – that's $1.66 per 100 hands ($0.25 * 6.66). Your hourly rate would depend on how many hands you play per hour – playing 500 hands per hour or more across multiple tables is not uncommon for online poker players.
If you're a tournament or SNG player then you should look at your return-on-investment (ROI). ROI refers to the net profit you've earned playing poker. Divide any profit by the gross amount you've invested and multiplied by the number of games you've played. A ROI of 0% would indicate that you're breaking even. Let's suppose you've played a 1,000 of your favourite $10 SNG's, spending $10,000 in the process. Over this period of games you've made a profit of $1,500, meaning your ROI would be 15%.
Hopefully you're win rate or ROI is positive because if you're not beating your current game then, most of the time, it's a mistake to move up. There are many benchmarks, formulas, statistics, and graphs available to judge yourself and other players – but it's better to concentrate on finding the games that maximize your dollars per hour played and grow your bankroll that way.
You should be beating the lower stakes games first. There's one exception to this that I'd make. Lower stakes poker games can be more heavily raked than the higher stakes games. This is a function of how the rake is calculated. When this is the case, it may make sense to move out of the lowest, and thereby most heavily raked game, as soon as possible, even if you're not beating it, – just to avoid getting crushed by the rake.
Sample Size
If you just had a winning session of $180 in 4 hours of $50NL, that doesn't mean that you are beating the game. If you just finished a session of 300 hands of $200NL and doubled your buy-in of $200, that doesn't make you a winning poker player. Similarly, if you just won a bunch of $20 tournaments in a row, it doesn't matter. You might have just gotten lucky in each example. Generally speaking, to be really sure that you're beating the game you're playing in you need a much larger sample size – 10,000-30,000 hands is considered enough play to gauge how you are really doing in cash games – and 1,000 games for tournament players is a decent sample size.
Poker Session Win Rate Calculator
Your Playing Style
Some poker players are nits or rocks. They win small amounts by risking very little. They have little variance since they play a solid game and take very, very few chances. Other players are plungers. They take huge gambles – even with only very slightly the best of it. If you have a high variance style of poker – say you're a maniac, then you'd want to start with more. The former players will need less of a bankroll to move up than the latter players because they will show much less variance at the higher level – and will therefore have a much lower risk of running through their bankroll if they run bad for a while.
Bankroll Management
How much money do you have to play poker with? To decide whether you can sustain the variance of a bigger game you need to know what your poker bankroll is and how easily can you replace your playing bankroll? For some, getting $1,000 to play is simple. They have that in stray bills lying around their house – even with no official bankroll. For others, putting together even $50 is difficult. Knowing whether or not you can move up depends on your understanding how easy or difficult it will be to reassemble your playing bankroll if you lose it all at a higher stake. If it is easily gained, then you may play higher than if it is very tough to accumulate.
Calculations vary for determining what bankroll you need for different levels and while that's not the focus of this lesson it's worth going over some numbers yet again. So here's some bankroll management advice:
- For no-limit and pot-limit games a bankroll of 20-40 the maximum buy-in is recommended. So in a $25NL game, which would have blinds of $0.10/$0.25, the maximum buy-in would be $25. Therefore you should be aiming for a bankroll of $500 – $1,000 for these games.
- For limit hold'em I'd recommend a bankroll of 300 to 400 big bets – therefore a $1/$2 limit game would require a bankroll in the region of $600 – $800.
- For tournament players the standard bankroll requirements for large multi-table tournaments is generally around 100 buy-ins. Serious players should double this to 200 buy-ins or more.
Poker Session Win Rates
The ability to replace a bankroll increases as you play higher. You must be much more conservative in your estimates of what you need as you move up. Similarly, the idea is to have enough money to protect yourself from losing all of it at a few awful sessions.
Psychology and Comfort Levels
Psychologically a poker player is ready to move up when they feel comfortable to do so. When a player feels uncomfortable, they often play weak poker.
It doesn't matter whether or not you have enough money, theoretically, in your bankroll to play at a higher stakes if you, psychologically, don't feel comfortable playing at that level. There are millionaires, even billionaires, who just don't feel comfortable gambling higher than $3/6 limit or $1/2 no limit. Sure, they could afford stakes higher – much higher in fact. But for whatever reason, they just don't like to gamble with that much money.
If you don't feel comfortable making a bet because the stakes are too big for your brain, then it's unlikely you can play that high – period! However there are always exceptions to every rule, and if you are a tight, timid, winning player, then consider forcing yourself to move up. You can always move back down if you are not successful at the new limit, or if you're psychologically uncomfortable.
Testing the Waters
There's a major exception to all of these rules and bankroll requirements. You can test the waters in a higher stake game any time you want. You don't need a pre-determined amount of money; you don't even have to be a winning poker player in your current game. You can just buy-in for whatever the minimum is, see how you do, and then move back whenever you want to.
Wow! This is an incredible ROI as it shows that this player has earned 3.5 times his initial investment.
However, this is actually very deceiving. The reason that it is deceiving is because as we mentioned above, poker is a life long session and should not be based on one game. In other words, would you rather have an excellent ROI after one game and be a life long loser or lose one game and be a winning player over the course of your poker career?
I would lose one game and prefer to be a life long winner.
It is important that since poker is a life long session that it is understood that there are variances that will undoubtedly take place. That's why a ROI of 350% is unreasonable as it only shows one game and not a life long session of ups and downs.
For example, let's assume that our player played 1,000 games at the same stakes and won 1st place 77 times, 2nd place 186 times and third place 103 times. What is this player's ROI now?
First, we need to know how much this player won total. To do that, we will do the following:
* 1st Place - 77 x $29.25 = $2252.25
* 2nd Place - 186 x $17.55 = $3264.30
* 3rd Place - 103 x $11.70 = $1205.10
* Total Won = $6721.65
Now, you need to know how much your investment was:
* 1,000 games x $6.50/game = $6,500
To figure out our ROI all we need to do now is plug in our numbers into our handy formula:
* ($6721.65 - $6,500) / $6,500 x 100 = 3.41%
As you can see, that is quite a significant difference from a 350% ROI. This player here has played a standard sample size which should have had several variances, up and down, and has proved to be slightly profitable over time.
So, what is a solid ROI? Well, opinions will vary but the most common answer found will be around 10% or so. It is possible to be much higher, but if a player is looking at an ROI of 20%, 30%, or more, than it may be in their best interest to move up in stakes even if it means dropping the ROI a little bit. This is simply because even though the ROI will drop due to competition and such, there will be so much more money to be made playing at higher stakes. As long as a player is around 5 to 10%, they should be just fine.
Since we have tournament and sit n go ROI out of the way, it is time to now focus on all of you cash game players. Sadly, no, the ROI formula will not work for you.
Cash Game ROI
The ROI formula described above will not work for cash games because there are just too many different variables with no consistencies. Cash game players can sit down, buy in for the minimum up to the maximum, play for 5 minutes, then get up, and leave whenever they want. There is no set buy-in and worse yet it is much more difficult to use the ROI formula because there is no set prize pool either.
If a player wants to figure out how well they are doing at cash games, they will want to figure out how much money they are making per hour, similar to a job.
For example, if a player were to go online and buy in for $100 at a $1/$2 game and at the end of 1 hour they had $225 in front of them, they would subtract their buy-in from their total to see how much they profited.
* Total - Buy In = Profit
* Profit/Amount of Hours = $ Won / Hour
So, in our case, this is how much this player made per hour:
* $225 - $100 = $125
* $125/1 = $125 per hour
If he had the same amount after 8 hours, it would look like this:
* $225 - $100 = $125
* $125/8 = $15.63 per hour
This method of calculating an hourly rate can actually be used to figure out your hourly average over the course of a week, month or even a year as long as you keep track of how much you buy-in for each session, what you walk away with and how many hours you played each session. From here, you can determine how profitable you are at cash games.
Calculating Poker ROI
Hopefully it is apparent by now that calculating poker ROI is actually very easy to do. Not to mention that it is extremely important to learn simply because everyone has improvements to make in their game, whether good or bad, and knowing your ROI will let you know the extent of those improvements. Making improvements and adjustments is what poker is all about and solid poker players know this.
One of the concerns that I frequently hear, especially among small stakes poker players, is when and how to move up to a bigger game. How do you know if you are ready to move up to a bigger poker game or not? The simply answer is to move up when your bankroll is big enough, and move down when your bankroll is too small. But there are more things to consider besides just the size of your bankroll.
Are You Winning?
There's really only one way to know. You must keep track, down to the dollar (pound, euro, yen, peso, or yuan will do too), of how much you win and how much you lose in each poker session. If you're playing online then be sure to use poker tracking software – because statistics will not only let you know where your strengths and weakness are in your game, they will assist in your decision of what games to play and when to move up to the next level. By reviewing your playing history you'll be able to see how you are doing per hour and per big blind or buy-in size.
Win Rates and Return-on-Investment
In cash games your win rate is generally the number of big bets per hour for limit poker and big blinds per 100 hands for no-limit hold'em. Let's suppose you've played 20,000 hands of $25NL ($0.10 / $0.25 blinds) and have made a profit of $2,000. Your win rate would be 6.66 bb/100 – that's $1.66 per 100 hands ($0.25 * 6.66). Your hourly rate would depend on how many hands you play per hour – playing 500 hands per hour or more across multiple tables is not uncommon for online poker players.
If you're a tournament or SNG player then you should look at your return-on-investment (ROI). ROI refers to the net profit you've earned playing poker. Divide any profit by the gross amount you've invested and multiplied by the number of games you've played. A ROI of 0% would indicate that you're breaking even. Let's suppose you've played a 1,000 of your favourite $10 SNG's, spending $10,000 in the process. Over this period of games you've made a profit of $1,500, meaning your ROI would be 15%.
Hopefully you're win rate or ROI is positive because if you're not beating your current game then, most of the time, it's a mistake to move up. There are many benchmarks, formulas, statistics, and graphs available to judge yourself and other players – but it's better to concentrate on finding the games that maximize your dollars per hour played and grow your bankroll that way.
You should be beating the lower stakes games first. There's one exception to this that I'd make. Lower stakes poker games can be more heavily raked than the higher stakes games. This is a function of how the rake is calculated. When this is the case, it may make sense to move out of the lowest, and thereby most heavily raked game, as soon as possible, even if you're not beating it, – just to avoid getting crushed by the rake.
Sample Size
If you just had a winning session of $180 in 4 hours of $50NL, that doesn't mean that you are beating the game. If you just finished a session of 300 hands of $200NL and doubled your buy-in of $200, that doesn't make you a winning poker player. Similarly, if you just won a bunch of $20 tournaments in a row, it doesn't matter. You might have just gotten lucky in each example. Generally speaking, to be really sure that you're beating the game you're playing in you need a much larger sample size – 10,000-30,000 hands is considered enough play to gauge how you are really doing in cash games – and 1,000 games for tournament players is a decent sample size.
Poker Session Win Rate Calculator
Your Playing Style
Some poker players are nits or rocks. They win small amounts by risking very little. They have little variance since they play a solid game and take very, very few chances. Other players are plungers. They take huge gambles – even with only very slightly the best of it. If you have a high variance style of poker – say you're a maniac, then you'd want to start with more. The former players will need less of a bankroll to move up than the latter players because they will show much less variance at the higher level – and will therefore have a much lower risk of running through their bankroll if they run bad for a while.
Bankroll Management
How much money do you have to play poker with? To decide whether you can sustain the variance of a bigger game you need to know what your poker bankroll is and how easily can you replace your playing bankroll? For some, getting $1,000 to play is simple. They have that in stray bills lying around their house – even with no official bankroll. For others, putting together even $50 is difficult. Knowing whether or not you can move up depends on your understanding how easy or difficult it will be to reassemble your playing bankroll if you lose it all at a higher stake. If it is easily gained, then you may play higher than if it is very tough to accumulate.
Calculations vary for determining what bankroll you need for different levels and while that's not the focus of this lesson it's worth going over some numbers yet again. So here's some bankroll management advice:
- For no-limit and pot-limit games a bankroll of 20-40 the maximum buy-in is recommended. So in a $25NL game, which would have blinds of $0.10/$0.25, the maximum buy-in would be $25. Therefore you should be aiming for a bankroll of $500 – $1,000 for these games.
- For limit hold'em I'd recommend a bankroll of 300 to 400 big bets – therefore a $1/$2 limit game would require a bankroll in the region of $600 – $800.
- For tournament players the standard bankroll requirements for large multi-table tournaments is generally around 100 buy-ins. Serious players should double this to 200 buy-ins or more.
Poker Session Win Rates
The ability to replace a bankroll increases as you play higher. You must be much more conservative in your estimates of what you need as you move up. Similarly, the idea is to have enough money to protect yourself from losing all of it at a few awful sessions.
Psychology and Comfort Levels
Psychologically a poker player is ready to move up when they feel comfortable to do so. When a player feels uncomfortable, they often play weak poker.
It doesn't matter whether or not you have enough money, theoretically, in your bankroll to play at a higher stakes if you, psychologically, don't feel comfortable playing at that level. There are millionaires, even billionaires, who just don't feel comfortable gambling higher than $3/6 limit or $1/2 no limit. Sure, they could afford stakes higher – much higher in fact. But for whatever reason, they just don't like to gamble with that much money.
If you don't feel comfortable making a bet because the stakes are too big for your brain, then it's unlikely you can play that high – period! However there are always exceptions to every rule, and if you are a tight, timid, winning player, then consider forcing yourself to move up. You can always move back down if you are not successful at the new limit, or if you're psychologically uncomfortable.
Testing the Waters
There's a major exception to all of these rules and bankroll requirements. You can test the waters in a higher stake game any time you want. You don't need a pre-determined amount of money; you don't even have to be a winning poker player in your current game. You can just buy-in for whatever the minimum is, see how you do, and then move back whenever you want to.
There's much to recommend taking brief stabs like this at bigger games. First of all, it may help you overcome the psychological difficulty of moving to a larger game in the future, when your bankroll and win rate justify it for the long term. It may even help you in your current game, if you tend to be too tight and worry about the money too much. Playing bigger, even briefly, may be like warming up in the on deck circle with a leaded bat. Your swings seem easier when you pick up the regular bat.
Of course there are some disadvantages as well. If you're playing poker way over your head, without a large bankroll, you may well be playing at a large disadvantage – either tightening up or just gambling because the stakes are too big for you. Similarly, you may cut your session unreasonable short if you start out with some bad luck in the bigger game.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you can move up when you are financially, psychologically, and skilfully able to do so. All of the above information is meant as a guide but not a cookbook for how to do that.
Know your success rate at each limit and for each type of game. The more a player analyzes and find leaks in one's game, the faster a player can move up to the next limit. This is crucial in helping you to establish what kind of bankroll you might need. But do not necessarily change your game. It could be just the gremlins of fluctuation.
Keep statistics of your poker sessions, and you'll then have a better idea of what size bankroll you'll need in order to continue playing the games you already play, and whether you can afford to move up to bigger limits, and bigger buy-ins. Keeping a record of your play will allow you to make faster and better decisions and thus help advance your poker bankroll.
Poker Session
The fastest way to move up is to study a little, play a lot of poker, study a little, and play even more. What could be more fun than playing poker? At each level make sure to check your win rate or ROI – and if necessary, don't be too proud to move down in limits. This game takes even the best of poker players for big swings. Therefore, a big reserve is good for your psyche whether losing or winning.
Related Lessons
By Ashley Adams
Ashley Adams lives in Boston, Massachusetts and has been playing poker for decades. He is the author of two poker books and his specialty is 7-card stud and no-limit hold'em.
Poker Session Win Rate Chart
Related Lessons
Poker Session Win Rate Formula
